Though you might mistake Snow Leopard for plain old Leopard when you first boot it up, there's a lot of subtle stuff happening on screen and under the hood. Here's our guide to everything new in the latest Mac OS.

If we believe this shot, and we don't see much reason not to, a lucky Apple customer in Japan got a surprise with his Mac Mini purchase: A Snow Leopard install disc, ahead of its purported August 28th release.

It's easier than ever to pit Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard head-to-head: They're launching soon, both within a month of each other—and both are basically glorified service packs of the current OS.